Document Type
Syllabus
Publication Date
Fall 9-1-2024
Course Description
For millennia, the greatest thinkers and writers in human history have grappled with the question “what does it mean to ‘live well’?” For Greek and Roman philosophers, the question was centered on the concept of “the good life” or “the examined life.” But what is “goodness”? What needs to be known or practiced to live well, and how does “examining” our lives lead to fulfillment? For some, living well means living with restraint and moderation, seeking to limit bodily pleasure in order to purify the heart and elevate the mind. For others, living well means quite the opposite: getting the most out of our short time on Earth and seeking pleasure wherever it can be found. For secular activists as well as devout practitioners of many world religions, living well requires working actively to improve the lives of others instead of focusing solely on the self. In today’s world, we are often told that “happiness,” “balance,” and “wellness” are central to a life well lived. But what is “wellness” as we use the term today, and how should we process the reality that our physical bodies will inevitably become old, unwell, and broken over the course of our lives? This course explores all of these ideas and more as we seek to define for ourselves what it means to “live well.” Course readings will come from a variety of textual traditions across the globe and throughout human history, and will include selections from philosophical, religious, and literary texts. Authors and texts will range from the famously canonical (Plato, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, selected Buddhist kōans and sutras, excerpts from the Tao Te Ching and the Quran, excerpts from the Viking Eddas) to the commonplace (present-day podcasts about daily gratitude exercises, American self-help books like Brianna Wiest’s The Mountain is You, record-breaking bestseller The Fault in Our Stars by John Green).
Recommended Citation
Reading, Amity, "ENG 197E FYS The Art of Living Well Reading Fall 2024" (2024). All Course Syllabi. 690, Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University.
https://scholarship.depauw.edu/records_syllabi/690
Student Outcomes
Like all FYS courses, this course is a general education course, which means that it is one of the core courses you will take at DePauw that is not part of your major. All gen ed courses, regardless of their home department or program, share common goals. By the end of this course, you will be better able to: 1. Love learning and exude a commitment to continued learning throughout your lives. 2. Embrace healthy and sustainable living through self-reflection and commitment to cultivating positive relationships with others, and both the global and local environment. 3. Appreciate varied disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods for acquiring knowledge and demonstrate the ability to synthesize knowledge from multiple disciplines. 4. Develop capacities for clear, thorough, and independent thought that demonstrates the ability to analyze arguments on the basis of evidence and to understand the value and limitations of multiple types of evidence. 5. Clearly express your ideas and the ideas of others to varied audiences, both in writing and orally. In addition to these broad general education goals, this FYS course also fulfills some of the goals of DePauw’s multi-course Writing Program. DePauw’s general education requirements reflect the importance of writing for all students and all disciplines, so you will take multiple writing-intensive courses throughout your four years; First-Year Seminar is your first of these courses. As your first academic advisor on campus, I’ll continue to talk with you in future semesters about gen ed writing requirements, but for now, just remember this: all students need to take an FYS and a sophomore W-course prior to declaring a major as well as fulfill a ‘writing in the discipline’ requirement and a senior seminar within their chosen major. By the end of this semester, you will be able to: 6. Understand writing projects as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, summarizing, analyzing, and synthesizing sources. 7. Possess flexible strategies for generating ideas, proof-reading, editing, and revising. 8. Understand how to document both primary and secondary sources and why that is important. 9. Understand that the skills and habits learned in the first-year seminar can and should be transferred to other courses and writing contexts. 10. Be passionate about writing as a means for thinking, communication, expression, and action